Keynote. Professor Steven G. Johnson | JuliaCon 2019

Steven G. Johnson discusses metaprogramming and staged programming in Julia, explaining how they enable high performance and when to avoid macros.

Steven G. Johnson is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at MIT, where he joined the faculty in 2004 and previously received a PhD in physics (2001) and BS degrees in physics, mathematics, and computer science (1995). He has a long history of contributions to scientific computation and software, including the FFTW fast Fourier transform library (for which he co-received the 1999 J. H. Wilkinson Prize) and many other software packages. He has been using, contributing to, and teaching with Julia since 2012. He created and maintains blockbuster Julia packages that you may have heard of: PyCall and IJulia (and Julia’s FFTW bindings, of course). Professor Johnson's professional research concerns wave-matter interactions and electromagnetism in media structured on the wavelength scale (“nanophotonics”), especially in the infrared and optical regimes. He works on many aspects of the theory, design, and computational modeling of nanophotonic devices, both classical and quantum. He is also a coauthor on over 200 papers and over 30 patents in this area, including the textbook Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light.